The Midwich Cuckoos

"This was dramatized quite recently, with Keeley Hawes. They did a decent job, actually. It’s something that’s been dramatized a number of times because it’s such a great story. Margaret Atwood spoke about how she read The Midwich Cuckoos when she was a student, and it freaked her out so badly she had dreams about these evil children for weeks. This story is about how the instinct of motherhood can be subverted by an alien intelligence. Obviously, a cuckoo lays eggs in another bird’s nest. This group of women all give birth to babies who apparently are physically normal, but who can control them, and communicate with each other, and who develop much more quickly than ordinary children. They clearly have their own end in view. It’s about the way the instinct of motherhood can be used against the mothers in this case, but also against the whole community – it feels wrong to look at children and say that they’re evil or they’re other. And yet, in this case, it is actually true: the children are, if not evil, certainly other. It has a lot of resonance, because lots of people feel the new generation is other, that there’s something disturbing about them that freaks us out. I think that idea continues to be current. In this particular story, yes, they really are other. I think it resonates with young people in the same way that Chrysalids does, where they can see themselves as being the other, and that might not be a bad thing."